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Comment by orthoxerox | Hacker News Reader

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If you don't ban the nazis, you become a nazi site

Who are these nazis you're talking about? People posting a mod that removes a trigger warning from a remake of a 20 year old game[1]? Some pretty weak-sauce nazis.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1atpq7d/nexus_mod...

Don't forget the ultimate crime against humanity: changing a remade RPG's "body type 1" and "body type 2" character creation options back to "male" and "female" as they were in the original game.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/mod-that-restores-male-female...

Yes! Thank you! This is actually the perfect example, because that mod wasn't removed and the author was banned after he specifically said he was making the mod for the purpose of upsetting trans people. Even better with the context that he was linking to kiwifarms, a known hotspot for online harassment.

Nothing proves with more certainty that the GP of this thread has it backwards, the removed mods were uploaded with bad intentions.

Lmao that mod is clearly targeted at the worst kind of right-wing snowflakes. People who can't even see a trigger warning without getting incensed and try to legitimize their behavior by saying it's "misinformative," but then dog whistle who they're really talking to with the Pepe frog. Nazis are, by default, weak-sauce; not being able to tolerate something this innocuous is both weak-sauce and perfectly coherent with fascism's inherent insecurity.

You can't claim law of triviality when you rot were the ones that cared enough in the first place to change it. Changing settings back to match reality and original game settings is the only sane approach here, objectively.

> is the only sane approach here, objectively

How is any of this "objective" at all? The whole discussion from beginning to end is very subjective, both ways, but maybe I've missed out on new usage of this word.

> Nazis are, by default, weak-sauce; not being able to tolerate something this innocuous is both weak-sauce and perfectly coherent with facism's inherent insecurity.

I read stuff like this and I can't help but marvel at the irony when we're talking about people getting mad enough at an optional mod to get it banned.

Who's mad? I am not mad that their mod exists, I think they're sad snowflakes. I'm mad that people think removing intolerance from our communities is somehow hypocritical. The paradox of tolerance tells us that a community that tolerates intolerance turns into an intolerant community. Prune out the racists, the fascists, and the bigots at every opportunity or else they will ruin your society. Those who are intolerant should not be granted tolerance.

The trap a lot of the left has fallen into is often defining genuine disagreement over their ideas as "racist", "fascist", or "bigotry". This keeps those ideas from being challenged and refined thus making them ultimately unconvincing. "Tolerance" itself is a very loose concept here that has come to mean mostly the same as "political agreement". There's also no mechanism that I can see for correcting this issue. In this frame, the bar for what constitutes "fascism" keeps getting lower such that even mainstream political positions from 10-15 years ago are being labelled as "fascist" in some circumstances.

None of this seems healthy for the future of left wing thought and is already leading to a backlash (one naturally being called "fascist").

It's not a trap the left falls into. If anything, the left is overzealous in internal tone policing, to the point where activists and organizers wish it would become less of a distraction. You have organizations and individuals of prominence in the US political sphere who are openly and actively try to promote bigoted and fascist talking points and implement them in government, often using long-debunked arguments or outright lies, and the people insisting that these ideas are not bigoted or fascist are either being duped or arguing in bad faith. I do not and will not attribute good faith to reactionary, white-supremacist, ultra-nationalist right-wing movements as we have in the US.

If we're being honest those mods were not inoffensive, in fact most of them were specifically made for the purpose of causing offense.

No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game. If that's somehow offensive, then I'm sorry but it's utterly deranged and hateful for the 0.01% to insist that their way is the only way that can or should be for all.

Or look at it this way, nobody will demand any mods be removed or censored that do the opposite to older games.

> No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game

Exceptionally funny to read this in the face of the most recent example, where the author was banned after he explicitly said that he was making his mod for the purpose of upsetting people.

> No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game.

Too true! I can handle VTOL spacecraft, lizards with tits and guns that shoot other guns, but a gay person!? IMMERSION RUINED

That misses the point entirely. You know how bigoted people were in the 1970s right, when video games were still in their infancy? What if the early game industry or congress and the courts had decided that any depiction of a woman in games must conform to the moral standards of the day, so that if you have a female, she must be either a straight virgin, married to 1 faithful man, an old maid, a widow or dead.

Thats exactly what is happening today but in reverse.

> Thats exactly what is happening today but in reverse.

No, it's not.

For a start: it's not some overlording organization demanding this from the top: it's a ground-swell of people who come from diverse backgrounds entering the industry and making their voices heard.

For another it isn't an edict at all from an organization, government-affiliated or otherwise. It's companies realizing that making inclusive games boosts sales, and it doesn't hurt that they get a huge dose of free marketing from the Outrage Merchants by courting controversy that no well adjusted person gives two shits about, and well adjusted people tend to have more money which is all they care about.

If you don't like nonbinary pronouns, don't use them. If you find the new Horizon simply unbearable because Aloy doesn't look like a pornstar, don't buy it. There is simply no version of this where "Every product in this market isn't suitable for me, therefore I am oppressed" is going to scan for anyone outside your weird little group.

Touch grass.

>>If you don't like nonbinary pronouns, don't use them.

That's not even what I'm talking about, it's "Body Type A" or "Body Type B" where the proverbial child has been sawn in half so nobody can have it, these mods restore the choice back to people who have a legitimate claim TO their pronouns.

> these mods restore the choice back to people who have a legitimate claim TO their pronouns

Excuse me, what?

Who is the pronoun gatekeeper here? Who decides who has a legitimate claim to pronouns?

Sounds pretty transphobic to me, tbqh.

> Who decides who has a legitimate claim to pronouns?

The normal people, of course. :eyeroll:

I just can't fathom giving enough of a shit that people different from me exist and are doing things I don't want to do, in places I am not, with people I am not.

Genuinely, get a life y'all. This is so sad at this point.

If this is about that Tomb Raider mod that someone mentioned up above, this reaction is so overblown as to be hysterical. Three sentences of text that indicate a game that came out 30 years ago might have some offensive racial stereotypes is somehow so egregious to you? What is this about "restoring an experience?" The text displays before the game starts; it doesn't impact your experience at all. I highly doubt 99.99% of people care, let alone are upset that Crystal Dynamics would dare to acknowledge that games from the 90s weren't always tactful in their depictions of diverse ethnic groups.

It's so dishonest to strip out the context in your reply to try and make this issue sound like some valiant crusade when it's really just some racists who enjoyed a racist thing feeling bad that someone told them they should feel bad for being racists.

citation needed*

The last high profile case of this (the Oblivion "body type" one) was accompanied with a kiwifarms link by the uploader. It was a link to a thread in which users were competing for how many trans people they could encourage into completing suicides. These are the people you're carrying water for.

they lost me at censoring stuff, how can "mod" shop be a publisher lol

they think they have much more authority than they thought

Care to share a bit more in a "non-between the lines" manner so everyone understands? I'm a mod maker myself (including some mods published on Nexus) but have no idea what you're talking about.

I can't read comments like this without that one human thumb guy screaming FUCKING PRONOUNS into his webcam at full volume.

Gamers are so sensitive.

But don't you DARE make a mod to change the pronoun selection back to male/female or we'll BAN[1] you from our site (because you're so sensitive).

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/starfields-pronoun-removal-mod-has...

Who's sensitive? I feel like the people who made the mod are the sensitive ones, so sensitive that they can't exist in a fictional space where trans or non-binary people exist so they had to make a mod to restore their version of reality. The only thing they got right is that a world without trans people is, in fact, a fantasy.

Except that modder explicitly stated that the mod was created to offend trans people. Nexus has a right to not host transphobes who are using their platform in a way that could hurt their business.

I remember when Mass Effect 2 was a laughing stock for giving Miranda a prominent camel toe and half the cutscenes were just creepshots of her butt.

Now, if your female character looks like an actual human instead of a sex doll, teenage twitter pitches a fit.

And it's not like the modern AAA industry is short on games absolutely saturated with T&A. For fucks sake they just dropped Stellar Blade on PC, and the remaster of Lollipop Chainsaw came out recently too.

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